Featured Testimonial About Creighton University

(My son) picked the same school for the same reason that I did. The same magic is still here. I’m just so grateful for Creighton and all the incredible people who make a positive impact on students.

By Jon Nyatawa
Jim Wilson, BSBA’91, would never hesitate to tell anyone who’d listen about his impactful experience as a Creighton student, and how the lessons learned and relationships gained set him on a path to success. He’s now overseeing the operational budgets of 17 hospitals within the prestigious Mayo Clinic Health System.
Yet he didn’t truly realize how meaningful those Creighton years were … until he took his son on a campus visit.
Suddenly, the memories and the emotions came rushing back. But it was more than that. Deeper than that. He started recognizing a renewed sense of nostalgia and appreciation — something he’d not felt before. It continued as he watched his son, Brandon Wilson, BSBA’23, enroll at Creighton, walk in his footsteps and earn a degree.
“It was incredible, and maybe even more rewarding, to see through my son’s recruitment, through his school years, and through his graduation all the things I remember positively about Creighton,” Jim Wilson said. “The Creighton model, built on relationships and community, it’s still working. Creighton is the same in many ways, and it’s even better in other ways. I think that's something to be proud of.”
Plus, Wilson said, there’s something really neat about running into an old college acquaintance at a Bluejay basketball game and rekindling a friendship that’s been dormant for 30-plus years. Only at Creighton …
“All it took was a split second,” Wilson said. “We bumped into each other and instantly connected, just like we’d seen each other last week. Just the relationships, the connections at Creighton, it’s something special.”
Creighton definitely changed everything for Wilson 30 years ago.

He enrolled on a pre-med track but was encouraged to explore Creighton’s business school offerings. He’d once worked part-time as a paramedic. His parents had engrained humanitarian and altruistic principles during his upbringing — he seemed destined for a career in healthcare.
He eventually found the best of both worlds.
Wilson is the chief financial officer of the Mayo Clinic Health System, a Mayo Clinic community healthcare division. He stepped into this role in 2022. He was the system vice president for finance at the Rush University System for Health. He’s worked as an executive at hospitals in Tennessee, Illinois and Florida. All told, he’s spent three decades working as a healthcare financial strategist.
“I take care of people who take care of patients,” he said. “I don't think of my job to be someone who’s only assessing numbers, profit potential and other financial factors. It’s a balancing act where we all work collaboratively, managing our resources, to find the right answers and deliver results that benefit people.”
He had an ethics course at Creighton that he remembers repeatedly reinforcing this notion: What you do is not as important as how you do what you do.
Wilson took that to heart. He shares the thought with students in the executive MBA programs he instructs and with administrative fellows he mentors at Mayo.
There were countless other ways Creighton left an imprint on his life, too.

Something as simple as reaching out to and talking with faculty members and building new relationships with peers — Creighton encourages students to communicate and engage with others, Wilson said. He learned valuable skills that gave him an edge professionally.
Which is why Wilson didn’t hesitate when his son Brandon one day, seemingly out of the blue, asked him about attending Creighton.
They hadn’t talked much about it previously — even though Wilson had, over the years, encouraged prospective students at healthcare recruiting events and high school workshops to consider his alma mater.
A weekend later, they were headed to Omaha for a visit.
“He stepped foot on campus and he's like, ‘This is exactly where I want to be,’” Wilson said. “So, he picked the same school for the same reason that I did. The same magic is still here. I’m just so grateful for Creighton and all the incredible people who make a positive impact on students.”